Business Organization And The Myth Of The Market Economy

Explains the transitions in twentieth-century industrial leadership in terms of changing business investment strategies and organizational structures.

The Myth of Capitalism tells the story of how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives. Digital monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon act as gatekeepers to the digital world. Amazon is capturing almost all online shopping dollars. We have the illusion of choice, but for most critical decisions, we have only one or two companies, when it comes to high speed Internet, health insurance, medical care, mortgage title insurance, social networks, Internet searches, or even consumer goods like toothpaste. Every day, the average American transfers a little of their pay check to monopolists and oligopolists. The solution is vigorous anti-trust enforcement to return America to a period where competition created higher economic growth, more jobs, higher wages and a level playing field for all. The Myth of Capitalism is the story of industrial concentration, but it matters to everyone, because the stakes could not be higher. It tackles the big questions of: why is the US becoming a more unequal society, why is economic growth anemic despite trillions of dollars of federal debt and money printing, why the number of start-ups has declined, and why are workers losing out.

DIVChinese cultural and intellectual politics waned after the Tiananmen Square incident. This volume explores their revitalization in the 1990s./div

Concurrent with the increasing complexity of the field of management, the need to re-examine the foundations from which its theories have advanced has become ever more important and useful. The Oxford Handbook of Management Theorists examines and evaluates the contributions that seminal figures, past and present, have made to the theory of management by providing in-depth, up-to-date, and detailed scholarly analysis of their ideas and influence. Chapters by leading management and management history scholars explore the origins of each thinker or school of thought and their ideas, and discuss the significance and influence in a broader framework. The Handbook contextualises each theorist and their theories, analysing their actions, interactions, and re-actions to contemporary events and to each other. It is arranged in three parts: pioneers of management thinking from Frederick Taylor to Chester Barnard; post-war theorists, such as the Tavistock Institute and Edith Penrose; and the later phase of Business School theorists, including Alfred Chandler, Michael Porter, and Ikujiro Nonaka. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in how and why management ideas have emerged, and the ways in which they are currently developing and will evolve in the future.

It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

This book examines Modern Iran through an interdisciplinary analysis of its cultural norms, history and institutional environment. The goal is to underline strengths and weaknesses of Iranian society as a whole, and to illustrate less prescriptive explanations for the way Iran is seen through a lens of persistent collective conduct rather than erratic historical occurrences. Throughout its history, Iran has been subject to many studies, all of which have diagnosed the country’s problem and prescribed solutions based on certain theoretical grounds. This book intends to look inward, seeking cultural explanations for Iran’s perpetual inability to improve its society. The theme in this book is based on the eloquent words of Nasir Khusrau, a great Iranian poet: “az mast ki bar mast”. The words are from a poem describing a self-adoring eagle that sees its life abruptly ended by an arrow winged with its own feathers—the bird is doomed by its own vanity. The closest interpretation of this idiom in Western Christian culture is “you reap what you sow”, which conveys a similar message that underlines one’s responsibility in the sense that, sooner or later, we must face the choices we make. This would enable us to confront – and live up to – what Iran’s history and culture have taught us.

The work of G.B. Richardson has given insights into key issues and debates such as markets versus hierarchies, price stability, the economics of information and the concept of competition based upon differentiated firms. This collection encourages further development of Richardson's themes. It will make excellent reading for students looking at the capability or competence approach to the firm, and for all those wishing to familiarise themselves with the work of this important economist.

Based on extensive factory-level fieldwork research, this book charts the experiences of a textile enterprise in Russia during the 1990s, analyzing post-Soviet management and managerial practices in order to illuminate the content, nature and direction of industrial restructuring in the Russian privatized sector during the years of economic transition.